The Saint's Afternoon and Others

Before and above all was the sense that, with the narrow limitsof past adventure, I had never yet had such an impression of whatthe summer could be in the south or the south in the summer; butI promptly found it, for the occasion, a good fortune that myterms of comparison were restricted. It was really something, ata time when the stride of the traveller had become as long as itwas easy, when the seven-league boots positively hung, forfrequent use, in the closet of the most sedentary, to have keptone's self so innocent of strange horizons that the Bay of Naplesin June might still seem quite final. That picture struck me--aparticular corner of it at least, and for many reasons--as thelast word; and it is this last word that comes back to me, aftera short interval, in a green, grey northern nook, and offers meagain its warm, bright golden meaning before it also inevitablycatches the chill. Too precious, surely, for us not to suffer itto help us as it may is the faculty of putting together again inan order the sharp minutes and hours that the wave of time hasbeen as ready to pass over as the salt sea to wipe out theletters and words your stick has traced in the sand. Let me, atany rate, recover a sufficient number of such signs to make asort of sense.

I

Far aloft on the great rock was pitched, as the first note, andindeed the highest, of the wondrous concert, the amazing creationof the friend who had offered me hospitality, and whom, morealmost than I had ever envied anyone anything, I envied theprivilege of being able to reward a heated, artless pilgrim witha revelation of effects so incalculable. There was none but theloosest prefigurement as the creaking and puffing little boat,which had conveyed me only from Sorrento, drew closer beneath theprodigious island--beautiful, horrible and haunted--that doesmost, of all the happy elements and accidents, towards making theBay of Naples, for the study of composition, a lesson in thegrand style. There was only, above and below, through the blue ofthe air and sea, a great confused shining of hot cliffs and cragsand buttresses, a loss, from nearness, of the splendid couchantoutline and the more comprehensive mass, and an opportunity--oh,not lost, I assure you--to sit and meditate, even moralise, onthe empty deck, while a happy brotherhood of American and Germantourists, including, of course, many sisters, scrambled down intolittle waiting, rocking tubs and, after a few strokes, poppedsystematically into the small orifice of the Blue Grotto. Therewas an appreciable moment when they were all lost to view in thatreceptacle, the daily "psychological" moment during which it mustso often befall the recalcitrant observer on the deserted deck tofind himself aware of how delightful it might be if none of themshould come out again. The charm, the fascination of the idea isnot a little--though also not wholly--in the fact that, as thewave rises over the aperture, there is the most encouragingappearance that they perfectly may not. There it is. There is nomore of them. It is a case to which nature has, by the neateststroke and with the best taste in the world, just quietlyattended.

Beautiful, horrible, haunted: that is the essence of what, aboutitself, Capri says to you--dip again into your Tacitus and seewhy; and yet, while you roast a little under the awning and inthe vaster shadow, it is not because the trail of Tiberius isineffaceable that you are most uneasy. The trail of Germanicus inItaly to-day ramifies further and bites perhaps even deeper; aproof of which is, precisely, that his eclipse in the Blue Grottois inexorably brief, that here he is popping out again, bobbingenthusiastically back and scrambling triumphantly back. Thespirit, in truth, of his effective appropriation of Capri has abroad-faced candour against which there is no standing up,supremely expressive as it is of the well-known "love thatkills," of Germanicus's fatal susceptibility. If I were to letmyself, however, incline to that aspect of the seriouscase of Capri I should embark on strange depths. The straightnessand simplicity, the classic, synthetic directness of the Germanpassion for Italy, make this passion probably the sentiment inthe world that is in the act of supplying enjoyment in thelargest, sweetest mouthfuls; and there is something unsurpassablymarked in the way that on this irresistible shore it has seateditself to ruminate and digest. It keeps the record in its ownloud accents; it breaks out in the folds of the hills and on thecrests of the crags into every manner of symptom and warning.Huge advertisements and portents stare across the bay; theacclivities bristle with breweries and "restorations" and withgreat ugly Gothic names. I hasten, of course, to add that somesuch general consciousness as this may well oppress, under anysky, at the century's end, the brooding tourist who makes himselfa prey by staying anywhere, when the gong sounds, "behind." It isbehind, in the track and the reaction, that he least makes outthe end of it all, perceives that to visit anyone's country foranyone's sake is more and more to find some one quite other inpossession. No one, least of all the brooder himself, is in hisown.

II

I certainly, at any rate, felt the force of this truth when, onscaling the general rock with the eye of apprehension, I made outat a point much nearer its summit than its base the gleam of adizzily-perched white sea-gazing front which I knew for myparticular landmark and which promised so much that it would havebeen welcome to keep even no more than half. Let me instantly saythat it kept still more than it promised, and by no means leastin the way of leaving far below it the worst of the outbreak ofrestorations and breweries. There is a road at present to theupper village, with which till recently communication was all byrude steps cut in the rock and diminutive donkeys scrambling onthe flints; one of those fine flights of construction which thegreat road-making "Latin races" take, wherever they prevail,without advertisement or bombast; and even while I followed alongthe face of the cliff its climbing consolidated ledge, I askedmyself how I could think so well of it without consistentlythinking better still of the temples of beer so obviouslydestined to enrich its terminus. The perfect answer to that wasof course that the brooding tourist is never bound to beconsistent. What happier law for him than this very one,precisely, when on at last alighting, high up in the blue air, tostare and gasp and almost disbelieve, he embraced little bylittle the beautiful truth particularly, on this occasion,reserved for himself, and took in the stupendous picture? Forhere above all had the thought and the hand come from far away--even from ultima Thule, and yet were in possessiontriumphant and acclaimed. Well, all one could say was that theway they had felt their opportunity, the divine conditions of theplace, spoke of the advantage of some such intellectualperspective as a remote original standpoint alone perhaps cangive. If what had finally, with infinite patience, passion,labour, taste, got itself done there, was like some supremereward of an old dream of Italy, something perfect after longdelays, was it not verily in ultima Thule that the vowwould have been piously enough made and the germ tenderly enoughnursed? For a certain art of asking of Italy all she can give,you must doubtless either be a rare raffine or a raregenius, a sophisticated Norseman or just a Gabriele d' Annunzio.

All she can give appeared to me, assuredly, for that day and thefollowing, gathered up and enrolled there: in the wondrouscluster and dispersal of chambers, corners, courts, galleries,arbours, arcades, long white ambulatories and vertiginous pointsof view. The greatest charm of all perhaps was that, thanks tothe particular conditions, she seemed to abound, to overflow, indirections in which I had never yet enjoyed the chance to findher so free. The indispensable thing was therefore, inobservation, in reflection, to press the opportunity hard, torecognise that as the abundance was splendid, so, by the samestroke, it was immensely suggestive. It dropped into one's lap,naturally, at the end of an hour or two, the little white flowerof its formula: the brooding tourist, in other words, could onlycontinue to brood till he had made out in a measure, as I maysay, what was so wonderfully the matter with him. He was simplythen in the presence, more than ever yet, of the possible poetryof the personal and social life of the south, and the fun woulddepend much--as occasions are fleeting--on his arriving in time,in the interest of that imagination which is his only field ofsport, at adequate new notations of it. The sense of all this,his obscure and special fun in the general bravery, mixed, on themorrow, with the long, human hum of the bright, hot day andfilled up the golden cup with questions and answers. The feast ofSt. Antony, the patron of the upper town, was the one thing inthe air, and of the private beauty of the place, there on thenarrow shelf, in the shining, shaded loggias and above the bluegulfs, all comers were to be made free.

III

The church-feast of its saint is of course for Anacapri, as forany self-respecting Italian town, the great day of the year, andthe smaller the small "country," in native parlance, as well asthe simpler, accordingly, the life, the less the chance forleakage, on other pretexts, of the stored wine of loyalty. Thispure fluid, it was easy to feel overnight, had not sensiblylowered its level; so that nothing indeed, when the hour came,could well exceed the outpouring. All up and down the Sorrentinepromontory the early summer happens to be the time of the saints,and I had just been witness there of a week on every day of whichone might have travelled, through kicked-up clouds and otherdemonstrations, to a different hot holiday. There had been nobland evening that, somewhere or other, in the hills or by thesea, the white dust and the red glow didn't rise to the dimstars. Dust, perspiration, illumination, conversation--these werethe regular elements. "They're very civilised," a friend whoknows them as well as they can be known had said to me of thepeople in general; "plenty of fireworks and plenty of talk--that's all they ever want." That they were "civilised"--on theside on which they were most to show--was therefore to be theword of the whole business, and nothing could have, in fact, hadmore interest than the meaning that for the thirty-six hours Iread into it.

Seen from below and diminished by distance, Anacapri makes scarcea sign, and the road that leads to it is not traceable over therock; but it sits at its ease on its high, wide table, of whichit covers--and with picturesque southern culture as well--as muchas it finds convenient. As much of it as possible was squeezedall the morning, for St. Antony, into the piazzetta before thechurch, and as much more into that edifice as the robust odourmainly prevailing there allowed room for. It was the odour thatwas in prime occupation, and one could only wonder how so manymen, women and children could cram themselves into so much smell.It was surely the smell, thick and resisting, that was leastsuccessfully to be elbowed. Meanwhile the good saint, before hecould move into the air, had, among the tapers and the tinsel,the opera-music and the pulpit poundings, bravely to snuff it up.The shade outside was hot, and the sun was hot; but we waited asdensely for him to come out, or rather to come "on," as the pitat the opera waits for the great tenor. There were people frombelow and people from the mainland and people from Pomerania anda brass band from Naples. There were other figures at the end oflonger strings--strings that, some of them indeed, had prettywell given way and were now but little snippets trailing in thedust. Oh, the queer sense of the good old Capri of artisticlegend, of which the name itself was, in the more benightedyears--years of the contadina and the pifferaro--a brightevocation! Oh, the echo, on the spot, of each romantic tale! Oh,the loafing painters, so bad and so happy, the conscious models,the vague personalities! The "beautiful Capri girl" was of coursenot missed, though not perhaps so beautiful as in her ancientglamour, which none the less didn't at all exclude the probablepresence--with his legendary light quite undimmed--of theEnglish lord in disguise who will at no distant date marry her.The whole thing was there; one held it in one's hand.

The saint comes out at last, borne aloft in long procession andunder a high canopy: a rejoicing, staring, smiling saint, openlydelighted with the one happy hour in the year on which he maytake his own walk. Frocked and tonsured, but not at allmacerated, he holds in his hand a small wax puppet of an infantJesus and shows him to all their friends, to whom he nods andbows: to whom, in the dazzle of the sun he literally seems togrin and wink, while his litter sways and his banners flap andevery one gaily greets him. The ribbons and draperies flutter,and the white veils of the marching maidens, the music blares andthe guns go off and the chants resound, and it is all as holy andmerry and noisy as possible. The procession--down to thedelightful little tinselled and bare-bodied babies, miniature St.Antonys irrespective of sex, led or carried by proud papas orbrown grandsires--includes so much of the population that youmarvel there is such a muster to look on--like the charades givenin a family in which every one wants to act. But it is all indeedin a manner one house, the little high-niched island community,and nobody therefore, even in the presence of the head of it,puts on an air of solemnity. Singular and suggestive beforeeverything else is the absence of any approach to our notion ofthe posture of respect, and this among people whose manners ingeneral struck one as so good and, in particular, as socultivated. The office of the saint--of which the festa is butthe annual reaffirmation--involves not the faintest attribute ofremoteness or mystery.

While, with my friend, I waited for him, we went for coolnessinto the second church of the place, a considerable and bedizenedstructure, with the rare curiosity of a wondrous picturedpavement of majolica, the garden of Eden done in large colouredtiles or squares, with every beast, bird and river, and a bravediminuendo, in especial, from portal to altar, ofperspective, so that the animals and objects of the foregroundare big and those of the successive distances differ with muchpropriety. Here in the sacred shade the old women were knitting,gossipping, yawning, shuffling about; here the children wereromping and "larking"; here, in a manner, were the open parlour,the nursery, the kindergarten and the conversazione of thepoor. This is everywhere the case by the southern sea. I remembernear Sorrento a wayside chapel that seemed the scene of everyfunction of domestic life, including cookery and others. The oddthing is that it all appears to interfere so little with thatspecial civilised note--the note of manners--which is soconstantly touched. It is barbarous to expectorate in the templeof your faith, but that doubtless is an extreme case. Iscivilisation really measured by the number of things people dorespect? There would seem to be much evidence against it. Theoldest societies, the societies with most traditions, arenaturally not the least ironic, the least blasees, and theAfrican tribes who take so many things into account that theyfear to quit their huts at night are not the fine flower.

IV

Where, on the other hand, it was impossible not to feel to thefull all the charming riguardi--to use their own goodword--in which our friends could abound, was, thatafternoon, in the extraordinary temple of art and hospitalitythat had been benignantly opened to me. Hither, from threeo'clock to seven, all the world, from the small in particular tothe smaller and the smallest, might freely flock, and here, fromthe first hour to the last, the huge straw-bellied flasks ofpurple wine were tilted for all the thirsty. They were many, thethirsty, they were three hundred, they were unending; but thedraughts they drank were neither countable nor counted. This boonwas dispensed in a long, pillared portico, where everything waswhite and light save the blue of the great bay as it played upfrom far below or as you took it in, between shining columns,with your elbows on the parapet. Sorrento and Vesuvius were overagainst you; Naples furthest off, melted, in the middle of thepicture, into shimmering vagueness and innocence; and the longarm of Posilippo and the presence of the other islands, Procida,the stricken Ischia, made themselves felt to the left. The grandair of it all was in one's very nostrils and seemed to come fromsources too numerous and too complex to name. It was antiquity insolution, with every brown, mild figure, every note of the oldspeech, every tilt of the great flask, every shadow cast by everyclassic fragment, adding its touch to the impression. What wasthe secret of the surprising amenity?--to the essence of whichone got no nearer than simply by feeling afresh the old story ofthe deep interfusion of the present with the past. You had feltthat often before, and all that could, at the most, help you nowwas that, more than ever yet, the present appeared to becomeagain really classic, to sigh with strange elusive sounds ofVirgil and Theocritus. Heaven only knows how little they would intruth have had to say to it, but we yield to these visions as wemust, and when the imagination fairly turns in its pain almostany soft name is good enough to soothe it.

It threw such difficulties but a step back to say that the secretof the amenity was "style"; for what in the world was the secretof style, which you might have followed up and down the abysmalold Italy for so many a year only to be still vainly calling forit? Everything, at any rate, that happy afternoon, in that placeof poetry, was bathed and blessed with it. The castle ofBarbarossa had been on the height behind; the villa of blackTiberius had overhung the immensity from the right; the whitearcades and the cool chambers offered to every step some sweetold "piece" of the past, some rounded porphyry pillar supportinga bust, some shaft of pale alabaster upholding a trellis, somemutilated marble image, some bronze that had roughly resisted.Our host, if we came to that, had the secret; but he could onlyexpress it in grand practical ways. One of them was preciselythis wonderful "afternoon tea," in which tea only--that,good as it is, has never the note of style--was not to be found.The beauty and the poetry, at all events, were clear enough, andthe extraordinary uplifted distinction; but where, in all this,it may be asked, was the element of "horror" that I have spokenof as sensible?--what obsession that was not charming could finda place in that splendid light, out of which the long summersqueezes every secret and shadow? I'm afraid I'm driven to pleadthat these evils were exactly in one's imagination, a predestinedvictim always of the cruel, the fatal historic sense. To make somuch distinction, how much history had been needed!--so that thewhole air still throbbed and ached with it, as with anaccumulation of ghosts to whom the very climate was pitiless,condemning them to blanch for ever in the general glare andgrandeur, offering them no dusky northern nook, no place at thefriendly fireside, no shelter of legend or song.

V

My friend had, among many original relics, in one of his whitegalleries--and how he understood the effect and the "value" ofwhiteness!--two or three reproductions of the finest bronzes ofthe Naples museum, the work of a small band of brothers whom hehad found himself justified in trusting to deal with theirproblem honourably and to bring forth something as different aspossible from the usual compromise of commerce. They had broughtforth, in especial, for him, a copy of the young resting,slightly-panting Mercury which it was a pure delight to livewith, and they had come over from Naples on St. Antony's eve, asthey had done the year before, to report themselves to theirpatron, to keep up good relations, to drink Capri wine and tojoin in the tarantella. They arrived late, while we were atsupper; they received their welcome and their billet, and I amnot sure it was not the conversation and the beautiful manners ofthese obscure young men that most fixed in my mind for the timethe sense of the side of life that, all around, was to come outstrongest. It would be artless, no doubt, to represent them ashigh types of innocence or even of energy--at the same time that,weighing them against some ruder folk of our own race, wemight perhaps have made bold to place their share even of thesequalities in the scale. It was an impression indeed neverinfrequent in Italy, of which I might, in these days, first havefelt the force during a stay, just earlier, with a friend atSorrento--a friend who had good-naturedly "had in," on hiswondrous terrace, after dinner, for the pleasure of the gapingalien, the usual local quartette, violins, guitar and flute, themusical barber, the musical tailor, sadler, joiner, humblest sonsof the people and exponents of Neapolitan song. Neapolitan song,as we know, has been blown well about the world, and it is latein the day to arrive with a ravished ear for it. That, however,was scarcely at all, for me, the question: the question, on theSorrento terrace, so high up in the cool Capri night, was of thepresent outlook, in the world, for the races with whom it hasbeen a tradition, in intercourse, positively to please.

The personal civilisation, for intercourse, of the musical barberand tailor, of the pleasant young craftsmen of my other friend'scompany, was something that could be trusted to make. thebrooding tourist brood afresh--to say more to him in fact, allthe rest of the second occasion, than everything else puttogether. The happy address, the charming expression, theindistinctive discretion, the complete eclipse, in short, ofvulgarity and brutality--these things easily became among thesepeople the supremely suggestive note, begetting a hundred hopesand fears as to the place that, with the present general turn ofaffairs about the globe, is being kept for them. They are perhapswhat the races politically feeble have still most to contribute--but what appears to be the happy prospect for the racespolitically feeble? And so the afternoon waned, among the mellowmarbles and the pleasant folk---the purple wine flowed, thegolden light faded, song and dance grew free and circulationslightly embarrassed. But the great impression remained andfinally was exquisite. It was all purple wine, all art and song,and nobody a grain the worse. It was fireworks and conversation--the former, in the piazzetta, were to come later; it wascivilisation and amenity. I took in the greater picture, but Ilost nothing else; and I talked with the contadini about antiquesculpture. No, nobody was a grain the worse; and I had plenty tothink of. So it was I was quickened to remember that we others,we of my own country, as a race politically not weak, had--by what I had somewhere just heard--opened "three hundred'saloons'" at Manila.

VI

The "other" afternoons I here pass on to--and I may include inthem, for that matter, various mornings scarce less charminglysacred to memory--were occasions of another and a later year; abrief but all felicitous impression of Naples itself, and of theapproach to it from Rome, as well as of the return to Rome by adifferent wonderful way, which I feel I shall be wise never toattempt to "improve on." Let me muster assurance to confess thatthis comparatively recent and superlatively rich reminiscencegives me for its first train of ineffable images those of amotor-run that, beginning betimes of a splendid June day, andseeing me, with my genial companions, blissfully out of Porta SanPaolo, hung over us thus its benediction till the splendour hadfaded in the lamplit rest of the Chiaja. "We'll go by themountains," my friend, of the chariot of fire, had said, "andwe'll come back, after three days, by the sea"; which handsomepromise flowered into such flawless performance that I could butfeel it to have closed and rounded for me, beyond any furtherrehandling, the long-drawn rather indeed than thick-studdedchaplet of my visitations of Naples--from the first, seasonedwith the highest sensibility of youth, forty years ago, to thislast the other day. I find myself noting with interest--and justto be able to emphasise it is what inspires me with these remarks--that, in spite of the milder and smoother and perhaps,pictorially speaking, considerably emptier, Neapolitan face ofthings, things in general, of our later time, I recognised in myfinal impression a grateful, a beguiling serenity. The place isat the best wild and weird and sinister, and yet seemed on thisoccasion to be seated more at her ease in her immense naturaldignity. My disposition to feel that, I hasten to add, wasdoubtless my own secret; my three beautiful days, at any rate,filled themselves with the splendid harmony, several of the minornotes of which ask for a place, such as it may be, just here.

Wondrously, it was a clean and cool and, as who should say, quietand amply interspaced Naples--in tune with itself, no harshjangle of forestieri vulgarising the concert. I seemed infact, under the blaze of summer, the only stranger--though theblaze of summer itself was, for that matter, everywhere but ahigher pitch of light and colour and tradition, and a lower pitchof everything else; even, it struck me, of sound and fury. Theappeal in short was genial, and, faring out to Pompeii of aSunday afternoon, I enjoyed there, for the only time I canrecall, the sweet chance of a late hour or two, the hour of thelengthening shadows, absolutely alone. The impression remainsineffaceable--it was to supersede half-a-dozen other mixedmemories, the sense that had remained with me, from far back, ofa pilgrimage always here beset with traps and shocks and vulgarimportunities, achieved under fatal discouragements. EvenPompeii, in fine, haunt of all the cockneys of creation,burned itself, in the warm still eventide, as clear as glass, oras the glow of a pale topaz, and the particular cockney whoroamed without a plan and at his ease, but with his feet on Romanslabs, his hands on Roman stones, his eyes on the Roman void, hisconsciousness really at last of some good to him, could openhimself as never before to the fond luxurious fallacy of a closecommunion, a direct revelation. With which there were othermoments for him not less the fruit of the slow unfolding of time;the clearest of these again being those enjoyed on the terrace ofa small island-villa--the island a rock and the villa a wondrouslittle rock-garden, unless a better term would be perhaps rock-salon, just off the extreme point of Posilippo and where, thanksto a friendliest hospitality, he was to hang ecstatic, throughanother sublime afternoon, on the wave of a magical wand. Here,as happened, were charming wise, original people even down todelightful amphibious American children, enamelled by the sun ofthe Bay as for figures of miniature Tritons and Nereids on aRenaissance plaque; and above all, on the part of the generalprospect, a demonstration of the grand style of composition andeffect that one was never to wish to see bettered. The way inwhich the Italian scene on such occasions as this seems to purifyitself to the transcendent and perfect idea alone--idea ofbeauty, of dignity, of comprehensive grace, with all accidentsmerged, all defects disowned, all experience outlived, and togather itself up into the mere mute eloquence of what has justincalculably been, remains for ever the secret and thelesson of the subtlest daughter of History. All one could do, atthe heart of the overarching crystal, and in presence of therelegated City, the far-trailing Mount, the grand Sorrentineheadland, the islands incomparably stationed and related, was towonder what may well become of the so many other elements of anypoor human and social complexus, what might become of anysuccessfully working or only struggling and flounderingcivilisation at all, when high Natural Elegance proceeds to takesuch exclusive charge and recklessly assume, as it were,all the responsibilities.

VII

This indeed had been quite the thing I was asking myself all thewondrous way down from Rome, and was to ask myself afresh, on thereturn, largely within sight of the sea, as our earlier coursehad kept to the ineffably romantic inland valleys, the greatdecorated blue vistas in which the breasts of the mountainsshine vaguely with strange high-lying city and castle and churchand convent, even as shoulders of no diviner line might be hungabout with dim old jewels. It was odd, at the end of time, longafter those initiations, of comparative youth, that had thenstruck one as extending the very field itself of felt charm, asexhausting the possibilities of fond surrender, it was odd tohave positively a new basis of enjoyment, a new gate oftriumphant passage, thrust into one's consciousness and openingto one's use; just as I confess I have to brace myself a littleto call by such fine names our latest, our ugliest and mostmonstrous aid to motion. It is true of the monster, as we haveknown him up to now, that one can neither quite praise him norquite blame him without a blush--he reflects so the nature ofthe company he's condemned to keep. His splendid easy poweraddressed to noble aims makes him assuredly on occasion a purelybeneficent creature. I parenthesise at any rate that I know himin no other light--counting out of course the acquaintance thatconsists of a dismayed arrest in the road, with back flattenedagainst wall or hedge, for the dusty, smoky, stenchy shock of hispassage. To no end is his easy power more blest than to that ofministering to the ramifications, as it were, of curiosity, or tothat, in other words, of achieving for us, among the kingdoms ofthe earth, the grander and more genial, the comprehensive andcomplete introduction. Much as was ever to be said for ourold forms of pilgrimage--and I am convinced that they are farfrom wholly superseded--they left, they had to leave, dreadfulgaps in our yearning, dreadful lapses in our knowledge, dreadfulfailures in our energy; there were always things off and beyond,goals of delight and dreams of desire, that dropped as a matterof course into the unattainable, and over to which our wonder-working agent now flings the firm straight bridge. Curiosity haslost, under this amazing extension, its salutary renouncementsperhaps; contemplation has become one with action andsatisfaction one with desire--speaking always in the spirit ofthe inordinate lover of an enlightened use of our eyes. That mayrepresent, for all I know, an insolence of advantage on whichthere will be eventual heavy charges, as yet obscure andincalculable, to pay, and I glance at the possibility only toavoid all thought of the lesson of the long run, and to insistthat I utter this dithyramb but in the immediate flush and feverof the short. For such a beat of time as our fine courteous andcontemplative advance upon Naples, and for such another as ourretreat northward under the same fine law of observation andhomage, the bribed consciousness could only decline to questionits security. The sword of Damocles suspended over thatpresumption, the skeleton at the banquet of extravagant ease,would have been that even at our actual inordinate rate--leavingquite apart "improvements" to come--such savings of troublebegin to use up the world; some hard grain of difficulty beingalways a necessary part of the composition of pleasure. The hardgrain in our old comparatively pedestrian mixture, before thisbusiness of our learning not so much even to fly (which mightindeed involve trouble) as to be mechanically and prodigiouslyflown, quite another matter, was the element of uncertainty,effort and patience; the handful of silver nails which, I admit,drove many an impression home. The seated motorist misses thesilver nails, I fully acknowledge, save in so far as hisaesthetic (let alone his moral) conscience may supply him withsome artful subjective substitute; in which case the thingbecomes a precious secret of his own.

However, I wander wild--by which I mean I look too far ahead; myintention having been only to let my sense of the merciless Junebeauty of Naples Bay at the sunset hour and on the island terraceassociate itself with the whole inexpressible taste of our twomotor-days' feast of scenery. That queer question of theexquisite grand manner as the most emphasised all ofthings--of what it may, seated so predominant in nature,insidiously, through the centuries, let generations andpopulations "in for," hadn't in the least waited for the specialemphasis I speak of to hang about me. I must have found myselfmore or less consciously entertaining it by the way--since howcouldn't it be of the very essence of the truth, constantly andintensely before us, that Italy is really so much the mostbeautiful country in the world, taking all things together, thatothers must stand off and be hushed while she speaks? Seen thusin great comprehensive iridescent stretches, it is theincomparable wrought fusion, fusion of human history andmortal passion with the elements of earth and air, of colour,composition and form, that constitutes her appeal and gives itthe supreme heroic grace. The chariot of fire favours fusionrather than promotes analysis, and leaves much of that first Junepicture for me, doubtless, a great accepted blur of violet andsilver. The various hours and successive aspects, the differentstrong passages of our reverse process, on the other hand, stillfigure for me even as some series of sublime landscape-frescoes--if the great Claude, say, had ever used that medium--in theimmense gallery of a palace; the homeward run by Capua,Terracina, Gaeta and its storied headland fortress, across thedeep, strong, indescribable Pontine Marshes, white-cattled,strangely pastoral, sleeping in the afternoon glow, yet stirredby the near sea-breath. Thick somehow to the imagination as somefull-bodied sweetness of syrup is thick to the palate theatmosphere of that region--thick with the sense of history andthe very taste of time; as if the haunt and home (which indeed itis) of some great fair bovine aristocracy attended and guarded byhalberdiers in the form of the mounted and long-lanced herdsmen,admirably congruous with the whole picture at every point, andnever more so than in their manner of gaily taking up, as withbell-voices of golden bronze, the offered wayside greeting.

[Illustration: TERRACINA]

There had been this morning among the impressions of our firsthour an unforgettable specimen of that general type--the imageof one of those human figures on which our perception of theromantic so often pounces in Italy as on the genius of the scenepersonified; with this advantage, that as the scene there has, atits best, an unsurpassable distinction, so the physiognomicrepresentative, standing for it all, and with an animation, acomplexion, an expression, a fineness and fulness of humanitythat appear to have gathered it in and to sum it up, becomesbeautiful by the same simple process, very much, that makes theheir to a great capitalist rich. Our early start, our roundaboutdescent from Posilippo by shining Baire for avoidance of thecity, had been an hour of enchantment beyond any notation I canhere recover; all lustre and azure, yet all composition andclassicism, the prospect developed and spread, till afterextraordinary upper reaches pf radiance and horizons of pearl wecame at the turn of a descent upon a stalwart young gamekeeper,or perhaps substantial young farmer, who, well-appointed andblooming, had unslung his gun and, resting on it beside a hedge,just lived for us, in the rare felicity of his whole look, duringthat moment and while, in recognition, or almost, as we felt, inhomage, we instinctively checked our speed. He pointed, as itwere, the lesson, giving the supreme right accent or finalexquisite turn to the immense magnificent phrase; which fromthose moments on, and on and on, resembled doubtless nothing somuch as a page written, by a consummate verbal economist andmaster of style, in the noblest of all tongues. Our splendidhuman plant by the wayside had flowered thus into style--andthere wasn't to be, all day, a lapse of eloquence, a wasted wordor a cadence missed.

These things are personal memories, however, with the logic ofcertain insistences of that sort often difficult to seize. Whyshould I have kept so sacredly uneffaced, for instance, our smallafternoon wait at tea-time or, as we made it, coffee-time, in thelittle brown piazzetta of Velletri, just short of the final pushon through the flushed Castelli Romani and the drop and home-stretch across the darkening Campagna? We had been dropped intothe very lap of the ancient civic family, after the inveteratefashion of one's sense of such stations in small Italian towns.There was a narrow raised terrace, with steps, in front of thebest of the two or three local cafes, and in the soft enclosed,the warm waning light of June various benign contemplativeworthies sat at disburdened tables and, while they smoked longblack weeds, enjoyed us under those probable workings of subtletywith which we invest so many quite unimaginably blank (I daresay) Italian simplicities. The charm was, as always in Italy, inthe tone and the air and the happy hazard of things, which madeany positive pretension or claimed importance a comparativelytrifling question. We slid, in the steep little place, more orless down hill; we wished, stomachically, we had rather addressedourselves to a tea-basket; we suffered importunity from unchiddeninfants who swarmed about our chairs and romped about our feet;we stayed no long time, and "went to see" nothing; yet wecommunicated to intensity, we lay at our ease in the bosom of thepast, we practised intimacy, in short, an intimacy so muchgreater than the mere accidental and ostensible: the difficultyfor the right and grateful expression of which makes the old, thefamiliar tax on the luxury of loving Italy.